How to call cURL without using server-side cache?

I know this is an older question, but I wanted to post an answer for users with the same question:

curl -H 'Cache-Control: no-cache' http://www.example.com

This curl command servers in its header request to return non-cached data from the web server.

The -H 'Cache-Control: no-cache' argument is not guaranteed to work because the remote server or any proxy layers in between can ignore it. If it doesn't work, you can do it the old-fashioned way, by adding a unique querystring parameter. Usually, the servers/proxies will think it's a unique URL and not use the cache.

curl "http://www.example.com?foo123"

You have to use a different querystring value every time, though. Otherwise, the server/proxies will match the cache again. To automatically generate a different querystring parameter every time, you can use date +%s, which will return the seconds since epoch.

curl "http://www.example.com?$(date +%s)"

Neither -H 'Pragma: no-cache' nor -H 'Cache-Control: no-cache' helped me. In browser with "cmd+shift+r" (full reload) I was seeing a new version than the output of curl in terminal.

How to debug for yourself

To get the exact same result, I went to browser > F12 (Dev Tools) > Network/Requests > Right-click on the request > "Copy as cURL" and got the equivalent cURL command to the browser's call.

Then, I pasted that in the terminal and started removing the params one by one, until I found that surprisingly --compressed was making a difference in my case. (Calling CloudFront AWS)